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Fluent UGM A Success

Posted Thu August 29, 2002 @10:27AM

Seemingly immune from the doom and gloom pervading much of the high tech industry, the FLUENT Users’ Group Meeting (UGM) in June featured record attendance. About 280 people attended the three-day event in Manchester, NH, up 10% from last year.

The event was sponsored by some of the leading hardware vendors in the business. Hewlett-Packard was the gold sponsor, Silicon Graphics the silver sponsor, and Sun, IBM, and Compaq (now Hewlett Packard) served as bronze sponsors.

The CFD Pavilion, a highlight of the meeting, featured 22 partner booths, information on Fluent products and services, and posters by Fluent staff illustrating the latest in CFD technology.

The FLUENT user conference is one of three sponsored each year by Fluent Incorporated. The UGM for the company’s FIDAP and POLYFLOW products was held in Evanston, Illinois and the Automotive Industry user conference was held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, both earlier this year. The total attendance at the three meetings was nearly 600 people, a 13% increase over last year.

In addition to product reports for FLUENT and GAMBIT, the company’s preprocessor, the FLUENT user conference included eight half-day training courses. One course on visualization featured invited speakers from Computational Engineering International (CEI), Intelligent Light, and Fuel-Tech. There were 10 separate user presentation sessions covering topics in Power Generation, Aerospace, Environmental, Materials, Chemical Processing, Heating/Ventilation/Air Conditioning (HVAC), and General Topics. The event also included twelve short courses by Fluent staff on topics such as marine applications, fuel cells, multiphase flow with heat transfer and phase change, turbulence, and parallel processing.

An annual student poster contest was introduced this year, and two winners were chosen. Dong-Hee Kim of West Virginia University won the award for the best application for her paper entitled “Prediction of nucleation and coagulation modes in the formation of diesel particulate matter using FLUENT.” Ugur Pasaogullari, of Penn State University won for the best model implementation work. His paper was entitled "Computational fluid dynamics modeling of proton exchange membrane fuel cells using FLUENT". Both winners received an expense-paid trip to the UGM to present their work in one of the user presentation sessions. The event also included plenty of time for informal idea-sharing. For example, dinner on Tuesday evening was held at pool hall in a renovated mill building on the Merrimack River.